You don’t get to fly in now and donate Dad’s saw.” He was crying, and furious that he was crying, and I stood there in the cold garage with nine years of my own carefully-built silence in my throat, and every word of what he’d said was true, and none of it was the whole truth, and I did not know how to say the part he didn’t know without it sounding like an excuse.

So I said nothing.

That is the trap that closes around estranged people, and it had closed around me perfectly in that garage: the truth that would explain you is also the truth that would wound the person you’d be explaining it to, and so silence starts to look like the kind thing, when it is only the cowardly thing wearing kindness’s coat.

If I told Terry what our mother had said to me, I would be handing him, over the body of a woman he’d just spent two years nursing, proof that she had been crueler than he knew.